Attacked For Their “Poor Ability” to Run a Successful Consumer Packaged Goods Business.
It’s no secret that there are problems in the Canadian cannabis market. That’s why so many stocks are underperforming – and why executives at former high-flyers are abruptly leaving. It’s easy to pin this downward trend on bad planning or strategic direction, but it comes down to something even more fundamental: Producers have been struggling to truly differentiate their products and position them for specific target audiences. In other words, cannabis producers are some of the ONLY companies in Canada that can’t legally talk about the experience their products create unless they invest millions of dollars (and years of time) to complete clinical trials.
Recreational cannabis producers are not interested in conducting clinical trials because they are not making therapeutic claims about their products or studying the pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics of cannabinoids. Unfortunately, they have not been able to leverage the right technological tools and sustainable research models to develop (and leverage) their strongest message: describing in detail the “consumer psychoactive experience” their products create for various audience types. Frito-Lay can describe Doritos all day using terms like “mouth feel” and “satiety,” but Producers can’t go beyond meaningless strings of adjectives to describe their products. That’s why they find it so hard to differentiate their products in a marketplace flooded with hundreds of products that have similar cannabinoid properties – without the ability to ALSO describe consumer psychoactive experiences they create, all of these great products remain essentially undifferentiated.
This is exactly the problem Zentrela solves.
The root of the issue is a lack of scientifically validated and objective tools for measuring the actual consumer psychoactive experience created by a cannabis product. More to the point, there wasn’t even a sustainable way to conduct this kind of critical research. Sponsoring a full clinical study could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could take over a year to generate results – typically a scientific paper which adds tons of value to the scientific community but not to the actual business of producing and selling cannabis consumer packaged goods.
So if you cannot accurately measure consumer psychoactive experiences and collect this data in an affordable way, then you can’t reliably position your product to the right target audience that wants a desired experience.
Even if Producers know who the target audience is for a specific product, they cannot use non-scientifically validated consumer experience data due to the strict legal regulations that prohibit marketing content – which makes sense in order to avoid inaccurate or misleading claims.
Knowing THC or CBD amounts, taste, color, shape, texture, etc. are important product attributes, but they are not even close to delivering the value of objective, data-driven descriptions of the experience that consumers will achieve.
The only solution to this issue is SCIENCE – and here’s where Zentrela has designed a patent-pending solution to solve this complex problem from the root: we’ve developed the only neurotechnology platform that measures the actual psychoactive effects of recreational cannabis products, and we’re using it to document cannabis consumer experiences created by commercially available products. Most importantly, our data is immediately available and licensed at a fraction of the cost of a clinical study, which is why first moving Canadian cannabis producers are already accessing Zentrela’s scientific database of consumer experiences to better understand the performance of their products. They are using this knowledge to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of their R&D investments, understand what consumer segments represent the best target for their products and to create regulatory-compliant Information Promotions that better differentiate their products in a very crowded marketplace..
